Becky H. Huang

Do current English language development/proficiency standards reflect the English needed for success in school?

English language development or proficiency (ELD/P) standards promise to play an important role in the instruction and assessment of the language development of English language learner (ELL) pre-K-12 students, but to do so effectively they must convey the progression of student language learning in authentic school contexts for authentic academic purposes. The construct of academic English is defined as the vocabulary, sentence structures, and discourse associated with language used to teach academic content as well as the language used to navigate the school setting more generally. The construct definition is informed by a relatively modest number of empirical studies of textbooks, content assessments, and observations of classroom discourse. The standards of a state with a large ELL population and a large multi-state consortium are then reviewed to illustrate the role of the academic English construct in the standards’ coverage of language modalities or domains, levels of attainment or proficiency, grade spans, and the needs of the large number of young English learners. Recommendations and potential strategies for validating, creating, and augmenting standards that reflect authentic uses of academic language in school settings are also made.

The Effect of Age on the Acquisition of Second Language Prosody

This study reports an exploratory analysis of the age of arrival (AoA) effect on the production of second language (L2) prosody. Three groups of Mandarin-speaking immigrants (N = 10 in each group) with varying AoA in the United States and ten native speakers of English as controls participated in the study. All participants read a paragraph of English, and their speech samples were subjected to three prosodic analyses: speech and articulation rates, native speakers’ judgment of the prosody based on segment-filtered speech, and analyses of tones and prosodic groupings using the Mainstream American English Tones and Break Indices (MAE_ToBI) transcription conventions. The L2 groups also filled out a survey providing information about their demographic background, English input, and socio-psychological aspects of language learning. The results revealed that the AoA factor impacted different aspects of prosody to varying degrees. Group differences were statistically significant for speech rate, degree of foreign prosody, the frequency of pitch accents, and the frequency of high boundary tones (H-H%). However, group differences were not significant for articulation rate, prosodic groupings, and the rest of the ToBI-labeled phonological categories. Multiple regression analyses further confirmed the AoA effect on degree of foreign prosody, the frequency of pitch accents, and high boundary tones (H-H%); AoA remained a significant predictor controlling for the effects of other variables. However, speech rate was predicted by English media exposure and motivation variable but not by AoA.

The Effects of Age on Second Language Grammar and Speech Production

The current study examined the age of learning effect on second language (L2) acquisition. The research goals of the study were twofold: to test whether there is an independent age effect controlling for other potentially confounding variables, and to clarify the age effect across L2 grammar and speech production domains. The study included 118 Mandarin-speaking immigrants and 24 native English speakers. Grammar knowledge was assessed by a grammaticality judgment task, and speech production was measured by native English speaking raters’ ratings of participants’ foreign accents. Results from the study revealed that the age of learning effect was robust for both L2 domains even after controlling for the influences of other variables, such as length of residence and years of education in the United States. However, the age of learning variable had a stronger impact on speech production than on grammar. The current results support the framework of multiple critical/sensitive periods (Long in Int Rev Appl Linguist 43(4):287–317, 2005; Newport et al. in Language, brain and cognitive development: Essays in honor of Jacques Mehler. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001; Werker and Tees in Dev Psychobiol 46(3):233–251, 2005).

Numerical morphology supports early number word learning: Evidence from a comparison of young Mandarin and English learners

Previous studies showed that children learning a language with an obligatory singular/plural distinction (Russian and English) learn the meaning of the number word for one earlier than children learning Japanese, a language without obligatory number morphology (Barner, Libenson, Cheung, & Takasaki, 2009; Sarnecka, Kamenskaya, Yamana, Ogura, & Yudovina, 2007). This can be explained by differences in number morphology, but it can also be explained by many other differences between the languages and the environments of the children who were compared. The present study tests the hypothesis that the morphological singular/plural distinction supports the early acquisition of the meaning of the number word for one by comparing young English learners to age and SES matched young Mandarin Chinese learners. Mandarin does not have obligatory number morphology but is more similar to English than Japanese in many crucial respects. Corpus analyses show that, compared to English learners, Mandarin learners hear number words more frequently, are more likely to hear number words followed by a noun, and are more likely to hear number words in contexts where they denote a cardinal value. Two tasks show that, despite these advantages, Mandarin learners learn the meaning of the number word for one three to six months later than do English learners. These results provide the strongest evidence to date that prior knowledge of the numerical meaning of the distinction between singular and plural supports the acquisition of the meaning of the number word for one.

A Cross-Linguistic Investigation of the Effect of Raters' Accent Familiarity on Speaking Assessment.

ABSTRACT The project aimed to examine the effect of raters’ familiarity with accents on their judgments of non-native speech. Participants included three groups of raters who were either from Spanish Heritage, Spanish Non-Heritage, or Chinese Heritage backgrounds (n = 16 in each group) using Winke & Gass’s (2013) definition of a heritage learner as being someone who reports cultural or ethnic ties and has family members who are native speakers of that heritage language. Using a 1–7 Likert-type scale, all participants evaluated the “overall English proficiency” and “foreign accents” of 28 speech samples selected from Educational Testing Service’s TOEFL iBT public data set. Approximately half of the speech samples were from speakers with a Spanish language background, and the other half were from speakers with a Chinese language background and were matched on English language proficiency. Results revealed that familiarity with a particular accent facilitated the identification of that accent. Although the three rater groups did not differ reliably in the ratings assigned to the speakers, the majority self-reported that their accent familiarity affected their evaluations and possibly made them more lenient toward speakers with familiar accents. Furthermore, all rater groups assigned higher ratings to Spanish speakers than to Chinese speakers.

Production of English vowels by speakers of Mandarin Chinese with prolonged exposure to English

Previous studies of non-native production of English vowels have demonstrated that a native-like attainment of certain distinctions is not guaranteed for all speakers, despite prolonged exposure to the target (e.g., Munro et al. 1996, Flege et al. 1997). The current study examines the applicability of this finding to a group of non-native speakers from the same L1 background (Mandarin Chinese) who are all long-term residents in the USA (7 years minimum) and adult arrivals (> age 18). These non-native speakers (N=36) and a control group of native speakers (N=22) were recorded reading two sets of materials: the Stella paragraph (Weinberg 2012) and five sentences from Flege et al. (1999). Vowel formant measurements were extracted for all tokens from the following three pairs of vowels: [i] ~ [ɪ], [e] ~ [ɛ], and [a] ~ [ʌ]. Euclidean distances between the z-normalized (F1, F2) mean values for the two vowels in each pair for each speaker show that the non-native speakers produce each of the three pairs signific...

The effect of input on bilingual adolescents’ long-term language outcomes in a foreign language instruction context

The aim of the current study is twofold: to examine the effects of input on bilingual adolescents’ long-term second language (L2) outcomes in a minority/foreign language context; and to understand the interaction between input and other potential predictors of L2 outcomes, specifically environmental variables, learners’ motivation and language learning aptitude. Participants included 97 Mandarin–English bilingual adolescents in Taiwan who learned English as an L2 between the ages of two to eleven. All participants completed a listening comprehension and a story-telling task in English and two standardized language learning aptitude tests. Participants and their parents filled out a detailed questionnaire providing information about family demographics and in-class and out-of-class L2 input. Correlation and multivariate regression analyses revealed that input played an important role in long-term L2 listening comprehension outcome, but not in speech production outcomes. The results also showed that environmental variables and language learning aptitude significantly predicted long-term L2 listening comprehension and speech production outcomes. Finally, out-of-class L2 input outweighed instructional input and current input outweighed early input. Since most previous research on the role of input in long-term L2 outcomes was conducted in a majority/societal language context, the present study contributes to the topic by specifying the effect of input in L2 acquisition in a minority/foreign language context.

The role of input in bilingual children’s language and literacy development: Introduction to the Special Issue:

Language acquisition depends largely on the quantity and quality of input (Hoff & Core, 2013). The robust role of input has been well established in monolingual child language and literacy acquisition (Goldin-Meadow & Mylander, 1990; Hoff, 2006; Huttenlocher, Vasilyeva, Cymerman, & Levine, 2002; Quiroz, Snow, & Zhao, 2010; Snow, 1977) and among adult bilinguals (Collentine, 2004; Flege & Liu, 2001; Moyer, 2014). Over the past two decades, the number of children growing up in bilingual homes or communities has grown exponentially worldwide (Huang, Davis, & Ngamsomjan, 2017). Nonetheless, relatively less attention has been devoted to understanding the effect of input on bilingual children’s language and literacy development. Despite the heterogeneity of the bilingual environment (Place & Hoff, 2011; Poulin-Dubois, Bialystok, Blaye, Polonia & Yott, 2013), the limited number of existing studies have focused primarily on the quantity of input and found that the amount of input correlates with bilingual children’s language development in a majority/societal language context (e.g. learning English in the USA or learning Dutch in the Netherlands; Blom, 2010; De Houwer, 2009; Oller & Eilers, 2002; Smithson, Paradis, & Nicoladis, 2014) as well as a minority/foreign language context (e.g. learning Malay as a minority language in Singapore or learning English as a foreign language in Spain; Dixon, Zhao, Quiroz & Shin, 2012; Muñoz, 2014). Few studies, however, have recognized the specificities and qualities of input on bilingual/biliteracy development (for exceptions, see Hammer, Davison, Lawrence, & Miccio, 2009; Place & Hoff, 2011) or explored how the impact of input on bilingual and biliteracy development may be mediated by other social and cognitive variables. Against this backdrop, this special issue, which consists of four empirical studies and two commentaries, aims to unpack the multidimensionality of input and examine how it interacts with other cognitive and social variables in predicting bilingual children’s language and literacy development. The empirical studies in this special issue were conducted with bilingual children between the ages

Leap-frog to literacy: maternal narrative supports differentially relate to child oral language and later reading outcomes

ABSTRACT Young children’s oral narration typically progresses from telling disordered events to production of well-sequenced stories. To investigate how this development is supported and whether effects of support extend to literacy, 59 mother-child dyads from low-income family backgrounds were studied longitudinally. Maternal verbal input to narration was assessed when children were three, four, and five years old. Children’s personal narratives were assessed at age five, and reading outcomes were measured at first, second, third and sixth grades on a subsample. Maternal support was differentially related to oral narrative and reading outcomes. Mothers first provided orientation information and supported developing story actions and events with their three- and four-year-olds and focused on narrative evaluation with their five-year-olds. Although few distal relations were found between maternal input and children’s oral narrative abilities, several types of maternal support across the preschool years correlated with later decoding, including prompts for and contributions of evaluation.